Five personality traits commonly known as the “Big Five” have been widely acknowledged as universal. But most available psychological instruments are not necessarily transferable to other cultures. They are referred to as “W.E.I.R.D.” (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) and lack the combined emic-etic approach that is necessary for a transcultural perspective. This intercontinental congress brings experts from Kenya and Germany together – thinking out of the box and collecting ideas for a scientific based partnership of East Africa and Europe. Main topics are psychological constructs that prove relevant for Human Resources Management. The Five-Factor Model, core self-evaluations, coping processes and acculturation as well as globalization effects and gender issues are discussed.

The Proceedings of the 9th Open German-Russian Workshop on Pattern Recognition and Image Understanding include publications (extended abstracts), that cover but are not limited to the following topics: - Mathematical Theory of Pattern Recognition, Image and Speech Processing, Analysis, Recognition and Understanding. - Cognitive Technologies, Information Technologies, Automated Systems and Software for Pattern Recognition, Image, Speech and Signal Processing, Analysis and Understanding - Databases, Knowledge Bases, and Linguistic Tools - Special-Purpose Architectures, Software and Hardware Tools - Vision and Sensor Data Interpretation for Robotics - Industrial, Medical, Multimedia and Other Applications - Algorithms, Software, Automated Systems and Information Technologies in Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics. The workshop took place from December 1st-5th, 2014, at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Koblenz, Germany.

Engineered nanoparticles (ENP) are widely used in different industrial fields and products. In the last years, the risk potential for the release of ENP in the environment has increased as never before. ENP are expected to pass the wastewater-river-topsoil-groundwater pathway. In the terrestrial and aquatic environment ENP can undergo aging and transformation processes which can influence fate, transport and toxicological effects to different living organisms.
The scope of this workshop is to gather researchers, scientists, experts and specialists from nanoparticle and colloid science, soil and environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology or neighbouring disciplines to discuss the latest results and findings in the field of aging, fate, transport and toxicological effects of nanoparticles in the environment.

From September 4 to 11, 1992, a fiirst meeting between Ukrainian and German scientists interested in mathematical and computer modeling of social processes was held at Vorzel' near Kiev. The meeting had been planned for nearly three years by Igor V. Chernenko and Mikhail V. Kuz'min, then members of the research group on mathematical modeling in sociology at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Science of the Ukrainian Republic, and had to be postponed twice due to the political development in the former Soviet Union, but thanks to the organizers' perseverance (and in spite of a strike of the airport personell at Kiev Borispol Airport on the eve of the conference) the conference could at last be realized.rnThe main purpose of the conference was to discuss a synergetic interpretation of large-scale destructive social processes as catastrophic phenomena in self-organized systems.

This paper originates from the FP6 project "Emergence in the Loop (EMIL)" which explores the emergence of norms in artificial societies. Part of work package 3 of this project is a simulator that allows for simulation experiments in different scenarios, one of which is collaborative writing. The agents in this still prototypical implementation are able to perform certain actions, such as writing short texts, submitting them to a central collection of texts (the "encyclopaedia") or adding their texts to texts formerly prepared by other agents. At the same time they are able to comment upon others' texts, for instance checking for correct spelling, for double entries in the encyclopaedia or for plagiarisms. Findings of this kind lead to reproaching the original authors of blamable texts. Under certain conditions blamable activities are no longer performed after some time.

The natural and the artificial environment of mankind is of enormous complexity, and our means of understanding this complex environment are restricted unless we make use of simplified (but not oversimplified) dynamical models with the help of which we can explicate and communicate what we have understood in order to discuss among ourselves how to re-shape reality according to what our simulation models make us believe to be possible. Being both a science and an art, modelling and simulation isrnstill one of the core tools of extended thought experiments, and its use is still spreading into new application areas, particularly as the increasing availability of massive computational resources allows for simulating more and more complex target systems.
In the early summer of 2012, the 26th European Conference on Modelling andrnSimulation (ECMS) once again brings together the best experts and scientists in the field to present their ideas and research, and to discuss new challenges and directions for the field.
The 2012 edition of ECMS includes three new tracks, namely Simulation-BasedrnBusiness Research, Policy Modelling and Social Dynamics and Collective Behaviour, and extended the classical Finance and Economics track with Social Science. It attracted more than 110 papers, 125 participants from 21 countries and backgrounds ranging from electrical engineering to sociology.
This book was inspired by the event, and it was prepared to compile the most recent concepts, advances, challenges and ideas associated with modelling and computer simulation. It contains all papers carefully selected from the large number of submissions by the programme committee for presentation during the conference and is organised according to the still growing number tracks which shaped the event. The book is complemented by two invited pieces from other experts that discussed an emerging approach to modelling and a specialised application. rnrnWe hope these proceedings will serve as a reference to researchers and practitioners in the ever growing field as well as an inspiration to newcomers to the area of modelling and computer simulation. The editors are honoured and proud to present you with this carefully compiled selection of topics and publications in the field.

As Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) initiatives are gradually moving out of the early experimentation phase it is time to focus greater attention on examining the structures, processes and operations surrounding E2.0 projects. In this paper we present the findings of an empirical study to investigate and understand the reasons for initiating E2.0 projects and the benefits being derived from them. Our study comprises seven in-depth case studies of E2.0 implementations. We develop a classification and means of visualising the scope of E2.0 initiatives and use these methods to analyse and compare projects.
Our findings indicate a wide range of motivations and combinations of technology in use and show a strong emphasis towards the content management functionality of E2.0 technologies.

With the ongoing process of building business networks in today- economy, business to-business integration (B2B Integration) has become a strategic tool for utilizing and optimizing information exchange between business partners. Industry and academia have made remarkable progress in implementing and conceptualizing different kinds of electronic inter-company relationships in the last years. Nevertheless, academic findings generally focus exclusively on certain aspects of the research object, e.g. document standards, process integration or other descriptive criteria. Without arncommon framework these results stay unrelated and their mutual impact on each other remains largely unexplained. In this paper we explore motivational factors of B2B integration in practice. In a research project using a uniform taxonomy (eXperience methodology) we classified real-world B2B integration projects from a pool of over 400 case studies using a pre-developed framework for integration scenarios. The result of our partly exploratory research shows the influence of the role of a company in the supply chain and its motive to invest in a B2B solution.